Louder Now

Ah, another successful week!  I was really glad and proud that we made it through the beta without too much fuss.  We hit all the goals we set for the Fedora Marketing team on time and on schedule with relative ease.  Otherwise, I was pretty annoyed that for some reason my feed dropped of Planet for a couple of days and I ended up talking to myself when I thought I was broadcasting.  I ended up having to track down people separately and make sure they were taking care of things, but everyone was at the top of their game.

We cleaned up some wiki stuff the early part of the week in prep for the beta, and I went through a couple more pages just to make sure everything was all good after last weeks tightening up.  One of the posts I put up while I was off planet was to remind people on the News Distribution Network to get on their ponies and start emailing their group of people. One thing that we need to talk about with the Translations team is about preempting the rush with translating stuff, and those meetings are going to be taking place next week.

Now though, its time we step into high gear.  Although there are less small tasks, we have the few big ones in the run up to release left.  They are also pretty cool projects which are also a lot of fun and if anyone is interested in helping out you can always join the fed0ra-marketing list or find us on irc.

First and foremost, on fp.o site, you should be seeing a banner similar to this rolling around: 

This is for the Fedora Picture Book which the Marketing team is working on.  I couldn't figure out how to make that a link, so I'll put it here.  If you have any pictures and want to be in the book or know someone who does, click it now--TIME IS RUNNING OUT!

Next up, this coming Tuesday is the deadline for submitting your slogan ideas for F11.  If you have something good, make sure you visit here and add it.  We will be discussing the submission at the marketing meeting on Tuesday and hope to decide on something so that it can be forwarded to the art team, etc.

We have also started work on a Press Kit.  Not just a one time thing, but something which is professional, classy and can be updated for each release.  It aggregates a bit of the various pieces of information on the wiki and makes them look nice and presentable.  Steven Moix has been working on press kit content in French while others of us are just working on layout and other ideas in general.  You can take a look at a preview here.  The content is just nonsense pasted in from various pages on the wiki, but its more for general idea.  Hopefully we can use what Steven and the guys come up with and just translate it to any language we want, stick it in the template and voila!

Otherwise, myself and Yannik have started working on the Faces of Fedora campaign again, and we have a list of people who we'll be contacting to submit stuff as we work on guidelines for general submission from everyone.

Overall, good times, and I am very proud of all the great work everyone on the team is doing.  If there was ever a fun place in the project to get involved this is it!

Fedora: Fixing Bugs Before Other Distros Even See Them, Since 2003

I was quite amused to see this, thanks to Bob who brought it to my attention via Jef. I don't even know if I want to say anything about this because it speaks for itself, but I will say that it definitely made me chuckle when I read it.

http://gquigs.blogspot.com/2009/03/fedora-beta-released.html

I wasn't aware that the target audience for Fedora Betas was the Ubuntu Community. Dammit! I need to go update all the marketing stuff now. ;)

Fedora 11 Beta

Fedora 11 Beta was just released minutes ago, you can get your copy fresh here: http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease.

This is prime time for the marketing time. If you have any tasks that are due for beta, Today would be the day to make sure those are wrapped up. We are going to take a look at those today and start looking forward to the GA release.

Also, if you are part of the News Distribution Network, please make sure that you have the beta announcement translated and try and contact press from the contact list and point them to the announcement, to other relevant information and figure out how you can help them spread the news!

{Insert Slogan Here}

Fedora 11 is right around the corner!!  This week during the beta readiness meeting, mizmo mentioned that we were still missing  slogan, or tag line, for the upcoming release.  Seeing as this has marketing's name all over it, I figured we should start working on this.  There were a few funny suggestions, but I ask you in earnest, what do you think our upcoming release slogan should be?

I set up a wiki page here with some keywords, which I hope people will continue to add to and I hope that from there we can begin to add some spices to the soup and come up with something great.

Show us what you got...

HAPPY 15th BIRTHDAY LINUX

Title says it all...

TWiFM: This Week in Fedora Marketing 2009.03.13

This week in Fedora Marketing is brought to you by the letters P and R and the number 7. All that aside, this week was fairly quiet. I had to miss the meeting on Tuesday, and that was unfortunate because we actually discussed something very new and cool and important. As per the discussions over the last two weeks we have developed a list of features which are central to the upcoming release to which we would like to devote in depth coverage. The list can be found here. If anyone is interested in picking up the couple of remaining features that would be a great help. It basically entails interviewing the feature developer and putting it up on a wiki space and document the feature visually if its relevant.

Also, pending Ian's announcement, we are literally on the cusp of opening up submission for pictures for the picture book. Hope to be able to update on that real soon now.

TWiFM: This Week in Fedora Marketing

Marketing is moving forward very quickly and making lots of good progress. The first notable item to advertise this week is that the marketing meetings have shifted time, to 21.00 UTC, in #fedora-mktg. This ended being the most convenient time for a large group of people to congregate so after discussion on the list we decided to move things to then. More information on the Marketing meetings, including logs can be found here.

Next, on the Fedora Picture Book front, things are moving quickly. Thank to Ian Weller there is a wealth of information on the wiki page. Most importantly is that if you want to be involved, go to the page, download, sign and send the release form to the proper place. We should start accepting photo submissions as early as next week, so hurry and get a move on if you want your pics to get approved in time for the book.

Also, everything else on the *NEW* Schedule is going as planned. If anyone sees anything that should be on there that isn't please let me know and add it! A huge thanks to Steven Moix for taking care of everything related to the new news distribution network. We have a hefty list of publications and press people now linked off that page so that we can easily keep track of who we contacted and spoke to.

I've personally been working on wrangling feature owners that want to be involved with the press push for the release. If you own something cool and want to make sure it gets well publicized for the release and I haven't spoke to you yet, please drop me an email. I'm also hoping to have the talking points completed for this Tuesday's meeting now that the feature freeze is done.

There was also a very interesting discussion at the tail end of last weeks meeting regarding a great idea that Gerold Kassube had for establishing a new format for marketing and just distributing information in general, revolving around the four foundations. If you're interested read the log, but more on that to come...

This Week and Next in Fedora Marketing

Fedora Marketing is getting back into good shape. We've been working hard over the past couple of weeks and this week was no different. I'll get into it things in a bit, but the most important change that people need to know about right away is that our new meeting time for Fedora Marketing Meetings is Tuesdays at 21.00 UTC. If you are available then, please join us, we would love to have as many people as possible active!

Otherwise, over the past week, we spent alot of time pruning and cleaning up our wiki space. The home page, https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing , is much cleaner now, and there is less old junk laying around. A big thanks goes out to Steven Moix for spearheading that effort.

Speaking of Steven Moix, he is responsible for setting up the new News Distribution Network. I volunteered to take care of English language stuff and we have a couple of other languages covered, but if you want in on the action and want to get your local langauge in on the mix, please go to that page and sign up and let us know on the list!

Also, significant improvements were made with regard to marketing's workflow and the issues I discussed last week. We've adopted a new release based schedule which can be found here, which lets us lay out tasks according to where we are in the cycle and clearly see who is responsible and accountable for them. There are still elements missing from this schedule, so if you feel as though something was left out, please go ahead and add it. I still have a couple of things to add myself. This template is going to be copied for each release and the version for the current F11 release cycle lives here.

We've also made some progress on the Fedora Picture Book. We finally have a release form and you can download it and find more instructions at the link above. I think we are going to start moving forward on this pretty rapidly in the coming weeks.

All in all a good week, lots more stuff to do over the weekend, adding tasks, figuring out a place to put pictures to be uploaded, assigning tasks, etc. Should be fun, hope you'll help. We've got a good thing going...

The NEW Fedora Marketing

Over the last few weeks we have been working to rejuvenate Fedora Marketing. A tremendous job, was and continues to be done by the folks on the team, in all areas and I just wanted to write a little about everything so that those not following closely could at least get the bigger picture of what's going on and also, maybe attract anyone else who might be interested.

Primarily, the focus of what has been going on is a restructuring of how marketing goes about establishing goals and splitting them up into tasks and then the time-frames for completing those tasks. Marketing has always been busy, except that some times, due to the nature of how tasks were assigned or randomly picked up, it was unclear what people what were working on what tasks lead to confusion. Additionally, there was up until the last few week a perceived fissure between marketing and the rest of Fedora. This was really more due to lack of communication than anything else, so we have been trying to address that problem as well.

After much discussion on IRC and on the list, we were able to identify three main barriers to efficiency and growth:

* First, we could adopt a better workflow, one which prioritizes tasks and puts them on some sort of schedule. The nature of Fedora is cyclical; a release-based cycle, we should try to align ourselves with that.

* Second, if things will be more fine grained with a new workflow, we can easily assign and clearly define who is responsible for what. Prior to this, many tasks were left by the way side because others were afraid of taking them and stepping on someone else's toes.

* Third, and most importantly, Marketing is a "sort of" function of 3 groups, Ambassadors, Docs and Art. We don't really communicate well with anyone in those groups. That being said, there are many tasks which cross over and can be worked on cooperatively. If only we had meetings scheduled, we would be able to identify those opportunities, and lighten the workload for everyone and be more efficient at completing it.

The proposed solution is to incorporate all these elements into a new process, with a new workflow for the team, which is schedule based. The insipiration for this was really drawn from the good work that John Poelstra does with his release schedules. That can be found here. Over the last 2-3 meetings of the Marketing team we have been working to put together a template schedule which we can use for every release and then use the template to put something together for each release. Right now, you can find the template here. We are still working on adding things to it, and please feel free to do so, if you can think of anything which we missed. Once all these core tasks are set in place, we can add to that all the other cool, non-release based things that we do, like the Fedora Picture Book.

What's up next and what you can do:

* Continue to add things to the schedule. This is vital, as over the next few releases we will be adhering strictly to this cycle.

* Cleaning up the Marketing space on the wiki. We should have a meeting about this at some point next week, but until then myself and a few others, and hopefully yet more volunteers will emerge to help us do this. All you wiki-masters out there, get your knives out...

* Start coming to the marketing meetings! The team relies on the energy and collaboration of the whole community and if you believe you can contribute some time, marketing is probably the most fun and easiest way to do that. Currently, we are trying to establish a new meeting time to accomodate more people. If you would like to start attending, please go to this page, and add your name to the list.

We are going to get marketing back on a more efficient track and get more heads in the mix to brainstorm cooler projects in the future. Are you in?

Get Started in KVM

I've recently had some good chats with the Qumranet guys, specifically revolving around community engagement and how to integrate more Fedora community members. A number of community members, both red hat and non, have been expressing alot of interest in this stuff for the last few month.

The KVM guys gave me some general guidelines, and I threw something together on the wiki here. If anyone has some time to devote to triage, that could probably be the biggest help right now and also if anyone wants to start hacking KVM and would like a mentor, the Qumranet guys are more than happy to oblige. Email me and I can hook you up with someone.

Otherwise, I hope that wiki page holds some useful info and serves as a central point of information exchange and that people will add stuff as we go, especially when SPICE and SolidICE are opened up to the world.

Fudcon Under Ice

FUDCon + Boston + January = Blizzard!

Woke up to close to a foot of fresh snowfall, car is buried, very cold!

Anyway, so far FUDCon has been great, despite the fact that I am severely jet-lagged. On Friday, spent most of the day with Clint, David, Ian and Karsten in 395 putting working on the AmbassadorKits, some marketing stuff and just general chit chat. Walked around some, caught some random people and tried to make sure people were taking pictures for the Fedora Picture Book we are working on and spoke to Colby very briefly early on to make sure we get testimonials for the video thingy.

Looking forward to Today, just need to manage to get the car out from under the ice!

Jealous that I'm Here Instead

He's done it again.

I just want to take this opportunity to point out that I am very, very, very, very, extremely, extremely jealous of one Mr. Jesse Keating.

That is all....

Update: P.S. No fair on stealing my lyrics-as-a-blog-post-subject thing either! I'm still jealous.

The Kids Are Alright

In a world of growing economic uncertainty, I'm glad to see that some people still have the ingenuity to creatively re-purpose the familiar...

The Feel Good Drag

In our game, you can usually quantify success by observing not only your own growth, but also what affects you are having on the greater community and those around you. Judging by that, I'm glad to report that one of my favorite open source projects, Magento, are well on their way to achieving success--if they haven't achieved it already.

Since their 0.6 release which is not too long ago, they've already reached 500,000 downloads. Their user community is also over 44,000 strong and they have over 60, thats right 60, translations. It is a true testament to the Magento team and their philosophy and dedication to the community model and to Open Source.

As if that doesn't suffice, others in the eCommerce space have begun to open source their offerings as they feel the heat from Magento. Oxid, a very popular German eCommerce software producer recently announced Oxid eShop is going open with eShop Community Edition. (Link is in German)

I stand by what I said months ago, Magento is killing it.

UPDATE: As I write someone showed me that Matt Asay posted about this as well on his Open Road blog.

Plymouth

Here's a link to a really great write up that the guys over at Phoronix did about Plymouth. Just remember, when you see it making its way to other distros, you saw it here first!

Jack

I'd Rather Be With an Animal, Part 1

My life is very adventurous. It seems that every time I go away something HAS to happen. I arrived at FSOSS earlier today and as you probably guessed, something happened. Stay tuned after the jump, because it really is quite an interesting and, even I have to admit, funny, story.

A quick summary of day 1 of the symposium first. Got in, got to Seneca, Got there right in time to see Greg moderating his panel. I've been mostly involved in the Teaching OSS @ FSOSS track, and pretty much spent all day in that room. What came out of it were some really good ideas. One particular idea which struck me the most were the alternative models for engaging the academic community. Specifically, one which came up quite a bit today and one which I mentioned before to a few people, is getting academic schools other than CS/CE, mainly business and law interested in Open Source. Personally, I think its a great idea, particularly since from a research perspective, there maybe more practical implications for a Business major or a Law major surrounding Open Source, than there might be coming from CS/CE.

At 2:00 was our big parlor meeting type thing revolving around finally putting together all the disparate pieces in order to get re-focus our energies surrounding Open Source in Education and advancing the cause. Our big idea was that we need some neutral, third-party space in which we can begin to coalesce and join up in a unified voice. The first steps, we agreed, was getting up a list of current institutions and individuals who are already doing Open Source education well so that we stop reinventing the wheel and create a pool which we can draw from. Some sort of consortium was thought to be the best idea and we are starting slowly but surely. For now, anyone who is doing any open source in academia related stuff would do themselves well by checking this site and maybe adding to it: http://tinyurl.com/tos-group

After we disbanded, the real fun happened when I wanted to track everyone down again when they went to dinner. On second thought, I'll post up the story in the morning because I'm tired and want to go to bed. Just know for now that it doesn't involve anything getting broken and is sort of a Twilight Zone meets Jurrasic Park type of tale.

Okay, really tired, going to sleep. To be continued...

Linux Foundation's End User Collaboration Summit

Just got back from the EUCS. It was pretty cool and I got to meet a whole lot of interesting people. The point of the EUCS was to bring together developers and community managers with end users to get some conversation started and analyze the present to come up with some cool stuff for the future.

The day started off with Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's Executive Director MCing some panels and talks by a few people including Red Hat's own Paul Cormier. Also, Anthony Williams, author of Wikinomics gave a keynote. He is one smart dude.

There were many cool sessions in a variety of different areas, including virtualization, power management, desktop-y stuff and mobile linux and I got to talk to some interesting people about a few pretty cool topics. Lots of people from Japan were there too, which was cool. All in all a cool day, although I tried to find education interested people and there werent many. I even tried to start an education break away session and no people came. Not that this was the right venue, but hey!, it was worth a try.

Jack

Looking for an MIT Student/Fedora Rep!

If anyone reading this is an MIT student and is interested in doing some awesome Fedora-related stuff on campus and with faculty, please let me know! Details to those who respond...

Fedora at LinuxWorld SF

Fellow Fedorans,

Please join the Fedora Project at next week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo taking place in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Ca. The show floor will be open Tues-Thu from 9:30am until 4pm. Additionally, we will have a Fedora BoF on Wednesday the 6th at 5:30pm. Please stop by the booth in the .org pavilion.

I will be recording video testimonials, so please bring a smile!

Rock the Vote

Just got done with voting for the F10 release name. I don't know how hot I am on the range voting, but we'll see. What are you waiting for?? Vote for the Fedora 10 Release name NOW!